Businesses use a wide variety of devices to display and market products to consumers. One ubiquitous way of displaying products in a retail environment involves the use of a plurality of vertically spaced, horizontally extending display shelves. A common marketing strategy, generally referred to as cross-merchandising, is to display synergistically related items together (e.g. cake mixes and birthday cake candles; flashlights and batteries; tooth paste and tooth brushes, and the like). For obvious reasons, it is not an efficient utilization of scarce, and thus valuable, shelf space, nor an effective marketing strategy, to place, for instance, birthday candles at the end of fifteen to twenty feet of cake mixes.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,346,166 and 5,683,003 generally disclose strip merchandiser hanger assemblies that display merchandise in front of a horizontal shelving unit. For example, the disclosed strip merchandiser hanger assemblies can be used to display birthday cake candles directly in front of cake mixes, rather than adjacent to the cake mixes. The disclosed hanger assemblies are adapted to support generally opposite facing plastic strip merchandisers at any location along the horizontal shelving unit. The plastic strip merchandisers each include uniformly spaced tabs, or triple-finger locking mechanisms that releasably grip the displayed merchandise.
One clear problem with these known strip merchandiser hangers is that the associated plastic strip merchandisers cannot be conveniently and cost-effectively configured or reconfigured, if at all, to support different types of merchandise. That is, no single strip merchandiser can support different products such as large products, small products, heavy products, and/or light-weight products, etc. (e.g. blister packs of different sized batteries) at the same time.
Accordingly, it is considered desirable to provide a new and improved upright product merchandiser that overcomes the foregoing difficulties and others while providing better and more advantageous results.